Writing to the Music of Your Life

I’VE TRIED MEDITATION, dosing myself with the prescription to apply it at the same time each day. And when I do, the silent, tunneling lack of thought sculpts my sharp edge into something I can use in the world, rather than something I merely use against myself. Exercise, too, razors off some degree of my resistance. But neither one has done enough recently to let me write something I want to write, and the longing for words soon became a search for a new kind of support. What to do?

I had already made myself a standing desk a year ago and had updated my computer to an even larger screen. I cleaned my office, throwing out the dead plants, and purchased and hung in my view my all-time favorite New Yorker cartoon next to print of my hands-down favorite painting.

Hmmm, I thought. Hmmm.

And then came the kind of gift that made me giggle. Lying on the floor sweating and panting during the insanely hard exercise class I take twice a week, some Donna Summer slid into the soundtrack and I was hauled off my mat and onto another sweaty floor, this one on West 54th Street, upstairs in the dark, being served by the shirtless boys in athletic shorts and tube socks in what was once Studio 54. And as I soared downstate, I stopped for a moment amid the clouds to wonder what the hell does music really do? How, for instance, did my soul’s jukebox pick that night and that venue from all the other – yes, I admit it – times I lost every single inhibition to the bidding of the great Donna Summer?

Yes, yes, I know about how what fires together wires together in the brain, and about neuroplasticity, and how memory moves, but this small association was transposing a 58-year-old woman in a third set of ab work into a 22-year-old in the thrall of life itself. And I pumped on. Thanks, Donna, but how did you do it, and if you did it, can you do it again? Specifically, can some other music do something similar, or, even more to the point, something else? And what would that music be?

I have worked in utter silence for more than 20 years finding all music too loud, too confining, too influential. Like painters who discover that wearing a green shirt they paint that day predominantly in green, I was finding words from songs dropping out of the soundtrack and into my texts. Not good.

It wasn’t always like this. When I lived in Manhattan, and music was required to drown out the sirens and the neighbors, and even the birds at dawn on those nights when I wrote all night (ah, those), I listened to a precise cocktail of music: Country during the day and William B. Williams’ Make Believe Ballroom every moment it was on the air. The country music, while discordant to my WASPy culture, taught me the simple delight of toying with language. Where else can you hear a lyric like, “She’s got a ring on her finger and time on her hands?” I never emulated those, but I did let them shake me up. And shaking up a writer is never a bad idea.

And then the music stopped. Maybe it was simply because the sirens and the shouting did not follow me upstate, and they didn’t, living as I do in a very old barn, hours above Manhattan.

But then came Donna, and while I’ve written before about the twinned memory aspect of music, this time I was singing a different tune, wondering if the music of my youth could help me write something I longed to write. Was it time to let it back in? Lovely as it was to be back at Studio 54, I don’t want merely to be 22 again. I don’t want just to be hauled off. I like it here. What I want is to write better and more, and more often. Always.

So I made a playlist, choosing 48 songs that range over 50 years of one type of music, the most recently recorded of which is Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. I already have on my devices entries such as “Gym List,” one for my classical music, and three from my daughter of her music that she thinks I should know.

Forty eight songs. As I write this, my bangs are bouncing over my eyes to the undeniable throb of the Allman Brothers. That’s right. I made a playlist. And it’s only rock and roll. And I like it.

Comments

This post was timely and made me laugh in recognition. Your playlist, I suspect, would be similar to mine. We both the same age, for one thing and when you said Allman Brothers, I knew we would be able to swap some stories about the moment we first heard “Elizabeth Reed,” “Melissa,” “Statesboro Blues.” As for disco, I have some songs that never fail me: Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” “It’s Raining Men,” Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.” Curious: any Led Zeppelin on yours? Like you, I fell out of listening to music — I work out in the pool now and I hardly ever spend enough time in a car. Listening to any music with lyrics doesn’t work when I’m writing but I’m about to start a new project and reading this reminded me of ways to tap into streams that might feed me in more ways that one. Thanks!

Hi, Betsy.
And I work out in the pool as well, having really hurt myself lifting weights a while back. So we have the pool in common, as well.
Yes, Led Zeppelin. After I made the list, I started remembering rock and roll moments such as seeing Mountain at the Fillmore East when I was, gulp, 14, and Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden when I was 15.
As I write this, Crosby, Stills and Nash are reminding me of the delicious bounty to be found on the Marrakesh Express.
Feed yourself, Betsy. Feed yourself.

I write best with classical music in the background. Most often, it’s a Tchaikovsky symphony. I never had a problem with this until I went to the symphony two weeks ago. As they played Tchaikovsky’s Sixth (my favorite!) I had difficulty turning off the part of my brain that was screaming at me to “write this down NOW!”

I always have had the fear that letting myself listen to music will somehow dilute the concentration that I need to write. But writing is both sweat and inspiration, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try. I know that I listen to music a lot, and love musical artists who can write a lyric as well as they can a stanza. Tom Waits, Bruce Sprinsteen, Warren Zevon, Christy Moore, Billie Holiday, Elvis Costello, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chuck Berry–the rhyme and rhythm, the imagery, the inevitability of the musical and poetic conclusions they reach–these have all found their way, I think, into the deep structure, into the writing part, of my brain. A writer who writes books has more room to move around in, and more room to fail, than a songwriter. Writing a song is like writing a haiku–you make your point right away, or you don’t make it at all. A good lesson.

About Me

BY WRITING AND TEACHING MEMOIR, I've learned that everyone has a story to tell. My most recent book is "The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text on Writing & Life." (Grand Central). [Read More]